Rogelio París Ramírez

Cuban filmmaker and director of documentaries and feature films. Rogelio París was born in La Habana in 1936. He pursued higher studies in Law at the Universidad de La Habana. With the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, he joined Cuban Television as director of musical and dramatized programs. In 1962, he attended the World Youth Festival held in Finlandia as artistic director of the Cuban delegation. A year later, he entered the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficas (ICAIC), where he made his debut as assistant director in the feature film El otro Cristóbal (1963). During this period, which extended until 1967, he also served as artistic director of musical programs at the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (predecessor of the Ministerio de Cultura de la República de Cuba), and was later appointed cultural director of the Cuban pavilion at the 1967 Canadian World Exposition. Likewise, he was artistic general director of the World Youth and Students Festival held in Sofía, Bulgaria.

Full professor of cinema at the ISA, in 2009 he was awarded the category of Professor Emeritus of that institution, both for his extensive teaching work and his cinematographic work.

As a filmmaker, he began as a documentarian by directing, in 1964, the medium-length film Nosotros la música, which explores the realm of Cuban popular music. París continued exploring this genre with titles such as Frontera: Primera Trinchera (1975), a short film that mixes elements of reality and fiction about Cuban border guards, and Algo más que una medalla (1982), a feature film about the XIV Central American and Caribbean Games, considered a reflection on man's will to overcome. However, it is La huella del hombre (apuntes sobre la cultura cubana 1959-1985), from 1986, a cinematographic summary of Cuban culture in the first twenty-five years of the Revolution, the documentary that has deserved the most praise. Thus, the distinguished intellectual Cintio Vitier affirmed that París had created "a spectacular documentary" and highlighted the vitality and rhythm of his images; on the other hand, poet Eliseo Diego believed that the documentary shows the unity of the spontaneous with the complex; and for writer Arturo Arango, the work achieves a coherent and multiple discourse, despite some excesses that alter its rhythm, and conceives culture as a requirement for all and by all.

París also participated in the realm of fiction, which he ventured into with the film Patty-Candela, in 1976, based on a true event (a plan allegedly devised in 1961 by the CIA to attempt the life of revolutionary leader Raúl Castro as a precursor to a false flag attack on the Guantánamo Naval Base, which would serve as a pretext for a North American attack on Cuba). The film presents a triptych structure: in the first part—titled "Operación Patty"—the activity of Cuban mercenaries attempting to carry out the CIA plan is narrated; "Caso Candela," which occupies the second half of the film, shows the intelligence work through which Cuban official security forces discover and thwart the plan. The film concludes with brief documentary information that informs the viewer about the outcome of this event.

Five years later, París undertook a new project: Leyenda, a film inscribed in the noir genre, which reflects the tumultuous Cuban reality in the period immediately before and after the triumph of the Revolution. The thematic axis is a subject who, although of bourgeois origin, experiences a progressive psychological evolution that leads him to identify with revolutionary ideals and, with this, to infiltrate himself as a Cuban security spy within the CIA and in groups based in Miami. In 1990, the war-themed film Caravana premiered. The work takes as its framework Cuban intervention in the Angolan War during the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century, and narrates the misadventures of a caravan tasked with supplying part of the Cuban troops fighting against the special Cobra unit sent by South African forces to annihilate them. This film, which features performances by distinguished Cuban actors Manuel Porto, Salvador Wood, Patricio Wood, and Enrique Molina, among others, was very well received by the Cuban public. In the opinion of Cuban critic Rolando Pérez Betancourt, one of the most important aspects of Caravana is the broad communication it establishes with the audience. For its director, Caravana summarizes the Cuban military mission in Angola; "it is the analysis of victory with its price to pay." Criticism within Cuba seems to agree that the film, which was worthy of a mention at the 1991 Berlin Festival and a screenplay prize at the Bogotá International Film Festival, avoids falling into propaganda despite touching on a very politically sensitive topic.

The last film by Rogelio París, Kangamba (2008), returns to the war theme and the Angolan War, this time to narrate, albeit fundamentally from a microhistorical perspective, the Battle of Kangamba, which occurred in 1983, for which it focuses on a broad and heterogeneous constellation of characters implicated in one way or another in the military event, among which stand out Captain Mayito (embodied by actor Rafael Lahera) and Lieutenant Colonel Lorenzo (Armando Tomey). It is worth noting in this film the use of special effects, something unprecedented in Cuban cinema, and which has been taken into account by national critics. Thus, Rolando Pérez Betancourt has opined that Kangamba is the first Cuban film that "sets itself the challenge of full spectacle" demanded by its story. The director, in relation to this film, confessed to having been inspired by photographs taken by Cuban war correspondents who covered the Angolan conflict, and declared that the film paid "a modest homage to these men who, with talent, sensitivity, daring, pen, tape recorder or camera, reflect, for the present, but also for history, the essence of these war-related milestones."

Filmography

1964 Nosotros la música (Documentary)

1968 Guardafronteras (Documentary)

1970 Testimonio (Documentary)

1975 Frontera: Primera trinchera (Documentary)

1976 La Batalla de Jigüe (Fiction medium-length film)

1976 Patty Candela (Feature film)  1977

La sexta parte del mundo (Co-direction, documentary)

1981 Leyenda (Co-direction, feature film)  

1982 Algo más que una medalla (Documentary)

1985 La huella del hombre (Documentary)

1990 Caravana (Co-direction, feature film)  

2008 Kangamba (Feature film)